In a fascinating example of poor timing, disk images of OS/2 2.0 pre-release level 6.605 from July/September 1991 were missingfor over 25 years, only to show up literally one day after the 25th anniversary of the OS/2 2.0 release (big thanks to a very helpful reader!).
This is a pretty unique pre-release of OS/2 2.0, and as such, it’s great it’s been saved like this.
I remember using OS/2 2.x with its shell set up to emulate 1.3. The 2.0 shell had a few different emulations that it could support, IIRC through makeini. That said, the 1.3 shell was primitive even compared to Windows 3.0, so using a 1.3 emulation was always a bit of a joke.
I remember being part of the 2.0 beta AND having a copy of the SDK. I think there were about a million floppies to each. I left everything behind when I left the job I had when I got these. I’m sad that I didn’t hold on to them because I’m sure my successor would have dumped them.
Life moves on.
I have OS/2 Warp 3.0 on floppies. It was a real joy installing it on my 486DX3/133 MHz.
But it was a lot of fun to play around in.
I think one of my versions of OS/2 has 38 or more floppies. It was sure nice when CDs came along.
I’ve used and supported many brands and versions of OSs starting with mainframes and then using DOS 1.x and going on from there.
DOS was reliable but you could only run one program at a time (yes there were ways around that but they weren’t used by “normal” users).
Windows could run multiple programs but was very unreliable.
OS/2 2.0 (which IBM totally BLEEPED up on their advertising which doomed it to failure) was both extremely reliable AND could run multiple programs at the same time. And not just OS/2 programs but also DOS and Win 3.1 programs and ran them better than on their native platforms.
While it wasn’t the prettiest OS it was definitely the first OS that I truly loved and was inspired to use. Meaning I couldn’t wait to use it some more. More for work and for personal use (memory management for DOS – I.E. for games, was far superior to native DOS so that DOS games ran better and faster in OS/2 in a DOS box than in native DOS itself. But also spreadsheet in Lotus 1-2-3 ran up to 800% (not a typo) faster in a DOS or Win 3.1 box faster than in native DOS or Win 3.1 on the exact same hardware.
Alas, as mentioned, IBM bleeped up the advertising of OS/2 and through their own internal political stupidity they screwed the OS to almost oblivion and we got stuck with what us OS/2 users felt was definitely an inferior OS.
BeOS was the next OS that I loved. Mac OS I like but don’t love. Windows is many, MANY points lower down in the hate section but I’m paid well to support it. It’s like throwing up in my mouth every day I use it though.
Anyway, OS/2 lives in eComStation and I would dual boot between OS/2 (eComStation) and Mac OS X if they had drivers that let it work on Mac hardware. But they don’t and I’m not buying a PC just to run OS/2. Therefore I’m Mac only at home and Window and Mac at work.
I really miss you OS/2 as well as Describe and Lotus and all the other programs I used on you along with countless DOS games that I would still run if there were significantly better games with significantly better graphics resolution than the DOS games.
eCS runs fine in a VM on Mac. No need to dual boot. Remains to be seen whether ArcaOS breaks anything.
I emailed the eCS group directly and they said there currently wasn’t a way to do this. If you know how, please give a link to where I can read about it.
Good grief, perhaps said group needs to tell Parallels, since it even provides tools for eCS. Fusion works too.
This is nothing new or esoteric. Support for eCS goes back to at least Parallels 5.0 IIRR.
Thanks. It looks like I will be using OS/2 again even if it goes by a different name.